Tracks
by Heldor
Summary: John is a private man. He doesn't put down roots. When Sherlock jumps off the roof of St Barts, he moves to the woods to hide away. Over 12 months he grows and changes. Throughout, Sherlock subtly lurks.


John Watson is a private man. He always has been; more so since Afghanistan. He still has that army habit of keeping things tidy. It's not just about being regimented- when your kit is tidy you know when anything's out of place. He'd trusted the men in his platoon with his life, but he never trusted them with his plate and spoon, or his standard-issue can opener. Stuff gets nicked all the time in a warzone.

Sherlock's habit of leaving his stuff everywhere had been a culture shock, at first. Waking up to find the contents of a desk drawer tipped out over the table in the pursuit of some small item. The living room was always Sherlocks; all his stuff filling every inch of space. John had just moved in around the edges. Most of his things he kept in his room, like a kid at his parents' house, but as time went on he stopped worrying so much. The night he came downstairs to fetch the book he'd finished that evening and left on the floor beside his chair was the turning point. Sherlock turned on the light when he stepped in; he'd been waiting. The damn man always knew when John was coming and going.

"You live here, John," he'd said, and his hand had reached out, slid around John's wrist where he was holding the book. "your room is roughly nought-point five sixths the size of the sitting room."

John had paused.

"So?" Sherlock looked at him with those unscrutable opal eyes.

"So I'm saying it's illogical for you to keep all your belongings in it." John felt his eyes drop down to Sherlock's mouth and then back up as the man spoke. He swallowed, and licked his lips. Sherlock hadn't released his wrist.

"Ah. Right. Well, I suppose you're right." Sherlock released his hand and turned on his heel, as though they'd never been in contact at all, into the kitchen, to peer through his microscope; some experiment which needed monitoring through the night, John supposed; the reason he'd been downstairs in the first place.

"There's a shelf," said Sherlock- and he was having one of those rare moments, John realised, where the consulting detective tried very hard to tackle a human emotion and wasn't entirely sure of how to hold it. He wasn't looking at John, motioning with his long fingers. "I cleared it for you. Put your books there. Move things off the table if you want more space."

John swallowed again, nodded- put the book on the empty shelf. The dust-outlines of what had been on it were still there; he didn't wipe them off before he walked back to the door.

"You live here too," Sherlock's voice was so quiet John almost didn't hear it, so he leant around to the kitchen. Sherlock was still looking at the microscope, "equal...partners. I'd like it if people were aware you lived here, as well as myself."

John smiled, and swallowed it down, straightening his face.

"Just as long as you don't have anything too tacky," and now Sherlock was smirking at him as he turned back to his experiment, and John rolled his eyes.

"Of course not," he said, beginning the climb up the stairs and shouting down. "I'll leave that to you and your skull."

"That skull belonged to a great man!" he yelled back, and John chuckled to himself as he closed his bedroom door.

When Sherlock is gone, everything in the flat is his. John stands there in the detritus of the other man's life. The shelf of John's books is too small for him to feel anything other than the loss of the other man's presence. He should have taken Sherlock's advice; he should have inhabited the room more, made it his, so that when this time came it wouldn't have been so obvious that nothing here was his. The Skull, the chairs, the horns on the wall- the table, the books- the _books_- hundreds of them, on subjects John doesn't even know the names of, let alone the facts within them.

He can't. He can't stay here. He packs a bag, instead. Mycroft is uncharacteristically gentle with him; they have a house, he tells him. In Scotland; the highlands. Mummy kept it for the winters, and they went there for Christmas when they were young. It is _his_, but it doesn't feel like Him. It feels like seclusion, and John inhabits it as he has never inhabited anywhere else.

It is good, solid, hard work; day by day. There is electricity, but only the lights. There's no heating or hot water and if he wants any he has to light the ancient old wood burner, so everyday he spends an hour splitting logs, trying to build up a stock pile before Winter. The first day, he is exhausted after ten minutes. The second day, the old war wound in his shoulder is aching after twenty. After two weeks he is beginning to develop lean muscle; he can swing for the full hour, until the pile of logs has dwindled to nothing and two sides of the house are stacked with split logs.

He walks in the woods. There's an old camera in a trunk upstairs that he takes pictures with sometimes; the trunk is brown banded leather, and the small silver inscription plate on the front says ", School House West" and he likes to imagine Sherlock banging his shin on it as he passed by it in his boarding house, the way John does every morning. He keeps it at the foot of his bed, with his clothes packed in it, military style.

It is cold, on his walks, so he puts a spoonful of whisky into his tea; a hot toddy. Sometimes a spoonful isn't enough, so he fills the small silver flask his father gave him when he turned 18. If he sometimes drinks a little more than he should, there is no one there to see. There is a hill, about five miles from the house. He likes to hike there when he has time, and he always has the time. He prefers to be tired when he goes to bed, because it makes it easier to sleep, and it makes him less likely to dream. He's wearing in the walking boots he bought in London before coming here. His legs are stronger now and his hands have callouses from where they slip on the smooth handle of the axe every morning. After two months, the hike is easy and routine.

He stands on the hill alone, and he drinks black tea- he rarely travels to town for milk- from the cup on top of his flask. He doesn't need to bring another, so the cup on the top is enough for him. It's less to carry, with a handle on the side, the other, silver, flask in his back pocket, which is lighter on the walk home, and a pair of old binoculars around his neck. There are birds in the valley; birds of prey, and he can watch them circle on the thermals as he sits on the stone cairn. It's quiet, and peaceful. There isn't another soul for miles. A cairn is a mound of rocks on the top of a hill, he has read; to mark the successful passage up the hill by hikers. However, a cairn can also mean a funeral mound; covering over dead warriors. He sits on it regardless, because that mirror-shiny black stone is miles and miles away. He doesn't talk to Sherlock, because the man isn't here and can't hear where he is.

Sometimes his leg hurts. He feels like an idiot when he has to limp up the hill. "psychosomatic." he mutters to himself, but the limp is still there. When he limps back home he sits in the kitchen and stares at the single pottery cup on the draining board, the one plate, the one knife and fork, and listens to the clock ticking. It is very quiet.

"Bored." he experiments. It's been six months, of course he's bored. He doesn't often have call to speak, though, so the word is alien in his mouth and it sounds like someone else speaking it. "Bored." he repeats again, and takes a deep breath.

He doesn't sleep that night. The bed is cold and not all that comfortable. He forgot to close the curtains, but it's too cold to get out of bed, so the moonlight is filling the room. There's an owl outside, screeching, and a fox. He wonders what it would be like to be a night-time creature. Whether the dark still holds fears for them. He takes a deep breath. When he turns over, his hand flops out onto the mattress where there is a large space. He turns to look at it and breathes in. It takes him a long moment to breathe out again, and when he does, he closes his eyes and doesn't think. He certainly doesn't think, but it doesn't help and he shakes his head and sits up. He makes a cup of tea and sits at the table with it. He doesn't turn the lights on, and when the tea is finished he builds the fire ready to be lit the next morning and reads one of the books he found upstairs; it's about animal tracks, but it isn't very enlightening. Everything leaves a track, the book says; you just need to know where to look. He falls asleep in his chair reading.

The next morning, there's a glass bottle of milk on the doorstep; the kind left by milkmen; with a foil lid, though John has never made an order; nor did he know milkmen worked a round out here. It's still cold, icily so, and he places it in the humming old refrigerator and makes porridge with brown sugar for breakfast and has milk in his tea. If it's been misdelivered he doesn't know who to return it to, so he takes foraging rights and uses it up.

He wakes up in the night, the next month, though he isn't sure why, and falls back to sleep. The wood pile is a little smaller the next day; he couldn't have noticed it, but there's three more stacks of split logs. He locks his door in the evening.

After 8 months, he sometimes forgets why he came to Scotland. He can go an entire day without thinking about Sherlock, and the grief takes him by surprise when he remembers it, and then the guilt of forgetting takes him over for a week. He still walks- now he knows that the birds of prey are hawks; there was a book about birds upstairs as well. He sees that one is a male and one is a female, and concludes that they are a pair. He feels lonely when he looks at them, but it's a good sort of loneliness, and the walk back home is easy now; he's hardly tired when he gets back home, so he cuts more wood, although he has plenty now. The pile of uncut logs grows at night too. There are petunias at the side of the house he hadn't seen before. He isn't sure if petunias can survive for many years; he hasn't found a book about gardening in the house yet, so he assumes they can, and that they have regrown from the earth during the spring.

After 12 months, the weight in his chest is starting to get tighter again. Winter is almost over, but it's still cold. Sometimes it seems much colder. He can't forget, he's come to realise; the longer he stays here the less likely it seems that he'll ever leave. He's not sure why he'd want to, now. London is very far away, and seems even further. Harry has stopped writing to him. Mycroft sent him a letter last month, repeating once again that he was welcome to stay as long as he liked in the house, and letting him know that a small service was being held in London on "the anniversary" if he wished to attend. John used the letter as kindling.

After a year, on the day, John doesn't get out of bed until ten. He puts on his well-worn walking shoes and packs his pockets. He doesn't want to cut wood, so he leaves the axe leant against the wall in the kitchen, and walks to the hill. He picks up a stone on the way, and he holds it in his palm as he goes until it comes to body heat and as he grips it it feels like a hand in his own.

When he reaches the top, he looks at the cairn for a long moment before he places his rock on the top. Then he finds a small piece of wood and splits it with his leatherman tool. He isn't quite sure of what to do, but eventually he starts to scratch into it. Two words.

I

Believe.

Then he picks up some dirt and rubs it against the wood, until the deep gouges are stained and the words become more legible. He tucks the wood under his stone and starts to walk back. He's been up on the hill for far longer than he intended.

There is a light, in the cabin. He hadn't turned them on that morning, so he is instantly wary, until he remembers Mycroft's letter. Sherlock's brother knows he is here. They are alike, in this grief; they are possibly the only people who truly miss that brilliant man; perhaps Lestrade too, but John had seen the doubt in his eyes at the funeral- the guilt from that doubt.

He doesn't want to spend the evening reminiscing with Mycroft, but he feels it's his duty; he has been holding vigil out here, and now it is his time to pay Mycroft out by sharing the news of their year.

The house is warm, and he can feel from the air that a kettle has been boiled in the kitchen. The tea pot is on the table in the lounge; he can see it through the kitchen door as he taps his toes to shake off mud.

"Is that you?" he calls, and his voice sounds strange in his ears. He realises it's been more than five months since he talked to anyone. "I didn't know you were coming," he says, shaking off his jacket, "or I'd have tidied up a bit." There are books and papers all over the dining table in the lounge- a dirty cup leaving rings on an unused sheet of paper, "Did you bring food, or-"

He stops. There is a coat thrown over the chair at the table. Long black wool. Red stitching on the top buttonhole. Red. Red like blood in a cartoon; not thick burgundy wine red like real blood, but scarlet. Sharp and eye catching. When you see it you stare down at the throat whilst the coat's owner is talking and your eye keeps turning back to it. The buttonhole is at eye-height for someone shorter than the coat's owner. His words catch in his throat. "no-" he mumbles- he half-staggers into the lounge. Someone is sat in his chair, in front of the fire.

"I would have called," the Voice says, "but you're rather secluded up here, and it was rather the point that you should think I was dead."

"Sh-Sherlock." The man. It's the man himself. Sat in his chair, but standing now. His face looks different. Of course it does. The last time John saw it the eyes were wide and staring, shattered glass in a pale face streaked with blood. His knees buckle, and he reaches out to steady himself, but Sherlock is already striding forward to hold him up.

"John-" he says, and John grips onto him tightly, the world spinning.

"Sherlock," he repeats, "Sherlock- you-"

"There now, you're going into shock- sit down before you fall down-" He's trying to push John down and he doesn't want that.

"No," he shakes his head, "no-"

"I didn't think," says Sherlock, still holding onto him. "Oh, John. I thought. I told you it was a lie." John shakes his head.

"You were never. You couldn't."

"When I heard you were out here I thought- a few weeks, but Mycroft told me you were still here-"

"_Mycroft knew_?"

"...eventually, yes. He helped me disappear a little." Finally John finds his words.

"Why didn't you tell me! I should have- you should have-"

"I had to disappear," he says quietly, and he starts to release John now that he is staying upright by himself, but the doctor holds him tightly. "You had a life-"

"I had _you_." John shouts, and once the words are out of his mouth he realises how true they are. He tells him what he told the headstone. "I was so alone. And then- then I met you. I had you, Sherlock. I had your life. I had the life you let me have, that I made with you." Those pale eyes are staring at him, frozen water. They look sad. "God, Sherlock," John says, and he moves his grip on Sherlock's arm, and his voice drops. "I had you... and you had me. You don't have friends, remember?" He tries to smile,"You just have me." Sherlock's face softens.

"...Do I still have a friend then, John. Even though I lied?" John outright laughs, though when he does it's choked.

"Barely- just, just barely, Sherlock. God, if you knew- if you'd known, how many times I-" he cuts himself off. After the war, alone in that single room, he'd though about all the soliders he knew who'd taken their own lives when they returned to civilian life. He hadn't understood then. He'd fought a different war after that, though. In the bathroom upstairs by the full bath, on the hill. God, on that hill. He'd spend an hour there sometimes, thinking of how he could end it. Swinging the axe- how easy he could make it to miss-swing, hit the femoral artery, bleed out. It would be easy for a doctor to end a life. He shakes his head though, instead of finishing the sentence, but Sherlock seems to understand anyway- of course he does, and something flashes in his eyes.

"God- John, I-" he licks his lips, blinks. John remembers the first case they worked on, when John had told him his dying thoughts; the look on Sherlock's face when he realised how close John had come to death. "I'm sorry." He manages. It's a rarity; hearing those words from that mouth, and John takes a deep breath.

"Sometimes, Sherlock," he says, shaking his head, "I really, really want to hit you." Sherlock smiles, "but other times, God-" and he reaches out and wraps a hand around the back of Sherlock's neck, pulling his face in to press their lips together. He's gifted with a brief moment of shock on Sherlock's face as, for perhaps the first time ever, John does something which surprises him. It takes a moment for him to kiss back, but when he does he is grabbing at John's shirt front, the kiss surprisingly desperate, tongues gently lapping against each other, neither of them sure which way to turn their head- john's teeth catch on Sherlock's lip and the other man lets out a needy whimper as John feels his eyes prickling. "Sherlock," he gasps, "Sherlock, god, Christ- Sherlock. I thought you were dead, I thought you were dead for so long," and finally the reality of the last ten minutes hits him like a flood as he begins to babble,

"every day, I thought about it every day- seeing you fall, watching you _jump_- the blood, your face, and that last conversation- what _happened_, why would you lie to _me_? I was in the flat for a week, I kept expecting you to show up at the window and tell me how you'd done it, but you never came, and I- Sherlock," he falls to saying his name again. It's been almost a year since he had reason to say it, and he wants to say nothing else.

"I'm sorry, John. I thought- I was... I was stupid." John barks a short laugh at that notion, "I should have known I could trust you. I did, in my own way- you were the only one I trusted to do what had to be done. To... mourn me. For everyone to believe I was really dead, you _couldn't_ know. Everyone would have suspected if you hadn't been truly... affected. But...I never thought- I never thought you'd still, after all this time-"

"God, for such a genius for are an almighty idiot sometimes, you know that?" And Sherlock grinned, and laughed, and John dropped his forhead to his chest and breathed in and out until his heartrate dropped to normal. "How could I ever be normal again," he whispered, "when my normal was you. I was in stasis until I met you. With you gone, I had... nothing. I did nothing. You brought me into your world and left me there. It was too big for me to do anything in it without you-" This time it's Sherlock whose lips find his, and it's a far more tentative move than John would have expected from the other man. He wonders, suddenly, if Sherlock has ever kissed anyone before. He can imagine him doing so for a case; playing a character, seducing and tricking, but he wonders if he has ever meant it. He makes sure to kiss back every bit as earnestly as he can; positive reinforcement.

"John," Sherlock sighs, "what would I ever do without my faithful doctor."

"Stop trying to find out," John whispers, "because if I have my way you won't ever have to know, alright? Just... don't... do that again. I can't- I can't take it. If you go, I go. Alright?" and Sherlock nods, just once, a brief flick of his head.

"Alright, John Watson," he says, "alright, fine. You have me if I have you."

"You have me. And I have you." They were good words, for a promise; whatever that promise might prove to be. And John took a deep breath, and smiled. And for a moment his face hurt from the motion, but in a short time, he knew, the muscles would get used to the work, and it would be easy again.


End file.
